Last June, David Gilmour chose the prestigious if low-key Meltdown Festival in London to show a new side to his music. It turned out to be a very special night at the Royal Festival Hall - now captured on 'David Gilmour in Concert' on DVD and VHS tape, released 23 September 2002. The utterly distinctive and distinguished voice and guitar of Pink Floyd gave a rare, lovingly staged performance at the Royal Festival Hall. It was so uplifting to both artist and audience that by early 2002, Gilmo...
Last June, David Gilmour chose the prestigious if low-key Meltdown Festival in London to show a new side to his music. It turned out to be a very special night at the Royal Festival Hall - now captured on 'David Gilmour in Concert' on DVD and VHS tape, released 23 September 2002. The utterly distinctive and distinguished voice and guitar of Pink Floyd gave a rare, lovingly staged performance at the Royal Festival Hall. It was so uplifting to both artist and audience that by early 2002, Gilmour was back at the venue for three more sold-out shows, joined on some songs by Rick Wright, his colleague from the Floyd. Three bonus tracks from that series have also been included on the DVD. Meltdown changes its curator annually. This year's was David Bowie. Last year's was Robert Wyatt (once a Sixties 'progressive' himself, in the Soft Machine). When Wyatt rang Gilmour with an invitation to play at the 3000-seat theatre, the answer was an immediate "yes". The high-decibel son et lumiere that typifies a Floyd show was no longer of interest to Gilmour. But how to embrace an intimate venue? "While Robert was still on the phone, an idea came to me, God knows from where. I thought: just a double-bass, a cello and a small gospel choir." Not a line-up he was used to. "Then I put down the phone and started to panic..." That initial panic led to Gilmour being credited in the Daily Telegraph, with inventing a "whole new genre." David Cheal described it in that paper as a "a sound that is warm, richly textured and genuinely different...ensemble music of the highest order." "More challenging and intriguing than anything Pink Floyd has done in decades," wrote Alexis Petridis in the Guardian. Obviously something with which Gilmour does not concur. "Not better, just different," he says. We should pause for a brief reminder here about how deep and wide Gilmour's musical reach has extended beyond Pink Floyd. He was, for instance, the man who nurtured the talent of an unknown teenager called Kate Bush, executive producing her enormously successful 1978 debut album 'The Kick Inside'. The same year, he released his first, eponymous titled album for Harvest following it in 1984 with 'About Face'. Gilmour was the only member of Pink Floyd to play at Live Aid in 1985 and has played on albums by Bryan Ferry, Pete Townshend, Grace Jones and Paul McCartney, amongst others. More recently, when McCartney dug back into his rock 'n' roll roots for 1999's 'Run Devil Run' album, Gilmour was on hand with his Fender Esquire to play and sing on the album and at the historic accompanying gig at the Cavern Club in Liverpool. Born in Cambridge, Gilmour joined Pink Floyd in 1968 after serving with the local band Jokers Wild. He went on to forge one of the most individual, expressive guitar styles in the lexicon of rock. But back to the Meltdown. With just three months to rehearse - eventually contracted into three weeks' intensive work with the musicians and singers - Gilmour had to figure out a set that fitted with the Festival's laid-back vibe while at the same time satisfying both himself and the hardcore Floyd fans. Stripping down some of his mega-bands anthems and presenting them in a mostly acoustic setting was one way to get back to the essence of the songs and render them more poignant. Rather more surprising for the audience was the inclusion of some pretty quirky favourites: folk, opera and even a lullaby from 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang'. It was a lovely evening. In scruffy T-shirt and jeans, Gilmour strode on stage alone, picked up his acoustic guitar, and teased the audience with a long run-in to a classic interpretation of the Floyd's 'Shine On, You Crazy Diamond' - substituting, with intriguing results, an echo-delay for the usual massed synthesisers. From there on, it just got better. Over the set, he was gradually joined by his backing musicians - Dick Parry on sax (who played on the original 'Shine On'); Neill MacColl on guitar; Chucho Merchan on double bass; Michael Kamen on piano and cor anglais, Sam Brown leading a nine-voice gospel choir; and - an inspired decision - Caroline Dale on cello. Listen to her picking up Gilmour's solo on the electric reprise of 'Shine On' - performed towards the end of the show - and you'll abandon any notions of a "class divide" between rock and classical music. Gilmour certainly did. "Here's a bit of culture," he announced, tongue in cheek, before singing an aria from Bizet's 'The Pearl Fishers.' "That's why the Meltdown is so brilliant," he says. "It's a proper, British, slightly esoteric, popular music festival." The type of festival where the wheelchair-bound Wyatt can suddenly appear in the stalls, to sing the "doctor" part on 'Comfortably Numb' (known best to Floyd-freaks for Gilmour's stunning guitar parts). A festival where, Gilmour now confesses, he was quaking with nerves before that lonely walk to the stage. This Meltdown concert can now be seen and heard by all those who couldn't get tickets. Bonuses on the DVD include all the guitar solos in close up ('Spare Digits"). "For all the guitar anoraks out there who want to follow my fat little fingers at work," says Gilmour. There's a 'Home Movie' of Gilmour and the choir during their first rehearsal at his home studio. "Polly was filming the kids mucking about in the garden when she heard the massed voices and came up and shot a bit so it's more intimate than most." There are also three extra, miscellaneous songs: Screaming Jay Hawkins's 'I Put A Spell On You' which Gilmour did with Mica Paris and Jools Holland some years ago, 'Don't' which was filmed at the Hammersmith Apollo last year at a concert in honour of Lieber and Stoller, and Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 ('Shall I compare thee to a summer's day ...), set to music by Michael Kamen, which Gilmour sang at the Old Vic earlier this year in aid of RADA. Gilmour isn't expecting sales to match 'Dark Side of the Moon'. Pink Floyd's fans will buy anything by the band, and Gilmour admits that they are "pretty adoring". But he also knows that, since the band has generally shunned personal publicity, "fans have to be quite well versed in the Floyd to know my name. Quite discerning." Then a smile creeps over his face. "Adoring but discerning," he says. "That'll do."
